Questions and answers about The Great Warming:
Why is ancient climate change important today?
I’m struck by how lamentably ignorant most people, even scientists and other scholars, are about ancient climate change. A lot of chatterers talk about a new climatic future, but they forget that humanity has been \living with unpredictable climatic shifts for tens of thousands of years. The ways in which ancient societies coped with sudden events like El Niños or lengthy droughts are both diverse and fascinating, and have much to teach us about how people handle climatic change, maintain sustainability, and modify their behavior. We have much to learn from our forebears, even if we do live in a different climatic era.
Are you arguing that climate change was a major player in human history? Surely this has been argued before?
Yes, it has, nearly a century ago, by a school of geographers who insisted that climate change “caused” major developments like agriculture. This kinds of linear climatic argument, that climate change like drought led inevitably to something historical, became known as climatic determinism—dirty words to generations of archaeologists. Now things are very different, for we now have access to extremely fine-grained climatic data like tree-rings, which now extend back 10,000 years in parts of Europe. For the fist time, we can accurately assess the impact of climate on ancient human societies, and understand that it was one of many players that affected history, and at times an important one.
What’s your most striking impression as a result of writing this book?
Just how opportunistic and ingenious people are at solving challenges thrown at them by climate change. It makes me feel optimistic about our long-term future, despite the appallingly difficult times that lie ahead.
Why a book on the Medieval Warm Period?
Some years ago, I wrote a book on the Little Ice Age, which began in the fourteenth century A.D. and ended in about 1860. I became aware of the Medieval Warm Period during the research for that book, but only really began to think about it when the furor over global warming picked up two or three years ago. When I looked into the literature, I realized that the warm centuries between A.D. 1800 and 1200 had important implications for our world.
What are these implications?
When I started my research, I assumed that the Medieval Warm Period was essentially a European phenomenon. But I soon discovered that, while the warm centuries were beneficial to Europe, they were near-catastrophic elsewhere, especially in the tropics, where drought accompanied greater warmth. If there was modest warming during the Medieval Warm Period, presumably the effects would be immeasurably greater in an era of greater warming. Drought is an invisible killer, what in the book I call the “silent elephant in the room,” which many people ignore.
When did you first realize the importance of drought?
The “ah-ha” moment came when I was looking into medieval droughts in the California Sierras. I came across the important researches of geographer Scott Stine, who discovered evidence for epochal droughts in medieval times in mountain lakes. These were prolonged dry spells, quite unlike anything experienced in modern times. From there, I found evidence of drought over wide areas, as far distant as Latin America and the Central Pacific.
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